


Her Sharp Edges

by LauraS26



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, No Beta, Reincarnation, Sass, War, badass Hermione, hermione is taking no shit, possible future Hermione/Kol or Hermione/klaus, slightly darker Hermione
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-31 06:27:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21098450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraS26/pseuds/LauraS26
Summary: When a faulty ingredient causes a ritual to go catastrophically wrong, 28 year old hero of the 6 year long wizarding civil war Hermione Granger dies. Then she’s born, in Mystic Falls Virginia. Wearing the one face that seems to draw vampires(and Original Hybrids) like catnip draws kittens.All she wants is to figure out if this new world has the components she needs to get back home, so could all these immature immortals just stop getting in her way and answer her questions please?





	Her Sharp Edges

**Author's Note:**

> I may take this down for editing if I get a beta, but I’m sick of looking at it right now so here you go. Feel free to weigh in on the pairing if you like, and totally point out any mistakes please.
> 
> Hope you like it xx

The gentle, rhythmic click clacking of wooden knitting needles filled the cosy, book lined room, the repetitive cadence soothing in its simplicity. Elena ‘Hermione’ Gilbert sat cross legged in her cosy, overstuffed grey armchair and stared into the middle distance. Her sure hands had no difficulty carrying on their mindless task while her powerful intellect was busy elsewhere. Knitting helped her to think. The actions first taught to her by Molly Weasley, and elevated by her inability to accept less than perfection from herself, were almost meditative now. The movements so ingrained in her muscle memory that they required no conscious thought allowed her to spend her mental resources elsewhere. And she also got attractive custom knitwear out of it. Wins all round. Her current project was a pretty knee length cardigan in a lovely, soft, merino wool. It was a rich carmine red, a few shades darker than the bold Gryffindor scarlet she’d worn in another life.

Currently her finely honed mind was rapidly contriving, weighing, and discarding a dizzying number of options. Potential courses of action she could take to further goals and objectives she had almost despaired of ever fulfilling. She was doing this now, because for the first time in sixteen years she had seen solid evidence that she wasn’t the only magical being in this world.

Hermione Granger had known who she was, who she had been, for as long as her new body had been capable of conscious thought. After her death in her original worldーshe had thought hard on the reaction that killed her and come to the conclusion one of the four diamonds she had been sold for her ritual had in fact been a cubic zirconia and botched the whole thingーshe had been reincarnated here as a chubby, silky haired baby girl called Elena Gilbert. Despite this scenario, she still fully considered herself to be Hermione Granger.

Her new family seemed nice enough, but growing up again, this time with the mind of an adult war veteran, had led to a lot of frustration and humiliation on Hermione’s part, and worried bewilderment on the part of the elder Gilberts. Hermione had never been good at playing a child, even when she was a child the first time around. It meant that her relationship with this new set of parents was a little stilted, but since she couldn’t quite bring herself to see them as her parents anyway—she had already _had_ perfectly good parents in Dan and Emma Granger—she wasn’t too torn up over it. Their relationship had finally settled over the years into vague affection and awkward semi-formality. Despite the distance, she had never felt that they didn’t love her, and she was uncomfortably fond of them in turn.

The fact that no creamy parchment letter had arrived by owl when she was eleven was a great disappointment. She had already been well aware that she was in another world by that point, but She had been hoping that this world would have its own version of the wizarding world where she could get her hands on magical materials and books. The lack of letter proved that either this wasn’t the case, or if they did have some sort of magical enclaves, they were set up very differently to the ones she had known. She knew the lack of letter wasn’t because she had been reborn in the USA, she would still have received an invite from Ilvermorny in that case. It certainly wasn’t because she had become a muggle. Hermione, never one to sit and do nothing at the best of times, and with her war forged need to be prepared for anything in such unexpected and alarming surroundings, had started practicing her magic as soon as she figured out how. 

That was a big difference between her old world and wherever she was now. Magic still existed here, but it didn’t work the same at all. While she could still feel a flicker of warm, familiar magic in her core, when she had first attempted a simple, wandless lumos, something she had mastered completely in her own life, her magic hadn’t responded in the slightest. After a brief initial panic, her logical mind had reasserted itself. 

Fact; the magic was there. Fact; she had attempted to channel it in a way she _knew_ was flawless and should have worked. Fact; the magic did not respond. And, after several more tries with less expectation and more observation, Fact; there was some sort of foreign magic, everywhere, that brushed against her curiously when she attempted to cast a spell.__

_ _It had been a strong sign this wasn’t her world at the time,when she was five, but not definitive proof. After all, it could have been this body that was different. Perhaps magic had always been like this, but this new body had the means to detect what a regular witch or wizard could not. Hermione was smart enough, and had matured enough to accept she didn’t know everything. _ _

_ _But the thought was there. Possible new data for her theory of magical linkage between alternate dimensions through astral resonance. Maybe a way to retrieve Sirius for Harry. If she could even get herself home of course. Her best friend still grieved the godfather he blamed himself for losing. It wasn’t even remotely possible for Hermione to do anything but try to fix it. _ _

_ _That was what she did. She looked after her stupid boys, and fixed the things that upset them. With extreme prejudice if necessary. _ _

_ _The war had forged her into a weapon of mass destruction, and peace had eventually tempered her into a powerhouse of knowledge and magical strength tightly harnessed by cold, brilliant intelligence. She always knew exactly where to exert pressure to get what she wanted, and she had never hesitated to do so since she let go of her soft, weak emotions. She hadn’t been called The Pitiless Death in hushed whispers from both sides during the dragging, six year civil war that followed the death of Voldemort for no reason. _ _

_ _She had once been someone whos mere presence would cause Death Eaters to flee a scene. Once wizarding Martial Law had been declared, the beleaguered ministry authorising civilians to use lethal force on confirmed Death Eaters, Hermione had applied all of her formidable focus to becoming what was needed to end the war with the minimum possible casualties on her side, and maximum efficiency. At first her plans had been geared towards capture, justice, but there was no room for such naive morality in a war zone. No room for mercy when a stunned enemy could easily be reenervated by one of their side and kill someone you cared about from behind. A lesson Hermione learned the hard way early on, when Thorfinn Rowle had revived some nameless cannon fodder mook, and said mook had, relieved of his wand, grabbed Luna by the ankle, dragged her to the floor before she had a chance to retaliate, and snapped her neck. She had swiftly crushed that weakness from herself, and replaced it with ice and logic. The results had been terrifying, or so she had heard. _ _

_ _After the war, and with her kill count sitting unpleasantly in the triple digits, she had felt unmoored. A weapon without a target. A tool without a purpose. She had been at war for her entire transition from childhood to adulthood. Those important formative years for her had been spent steeped in the blackest parts of the ‘Light’ side, and she had struggled to adjust to a less brutal frame of mind. She had been well aware that she had a horrifying case of PTSD but since mental health just wasn’t a thing for the British magical enclaves, and she couldn’t tell a muggle therapist anything without them attempting to commit her or winding up in Azkaban for breaking the statute, she had just had to work through it herself._ _

_ _Harry and Ginny had started settling down to start a family, both of their hands bloody, but nowhere near as dripping with red as hers. She had protected her friends from as much darkness as was possible when you were in a war, and she was proud of that. For all her monstrous actions, her aim had never been to hurt, but to protect._ _

_ _Ron’s soul was a little more damaged. Like her, the redhead was a tactician. A general. One who saw the bigger picture, and knew that war had no victors. He hadn’t slaughtered Death Eaters in droves like her, but he had helped plan and execute many, well, executions. Given orders that led to deaths on both sides. Despite that, he too had started settling back into a peacetime mindset much better than her. He had moved back into The Burrow and being surrounded by his remaining family had helped him immensely._ _

_ _Hermione’s family had been gone. Oh the Wilkes family living in Australia were perfectly fine, but in her youth and terror the young witch had massively overpowered her mind altering spells. Her parents’ memories had been permanently and irrevocably overwritten. Emma and Dan Granger would never be the same, so, devastated, she had elected to leave the happy Wilkes couple to live out their lives in peace. They were happy, healthy, and completely lost to her. Hermione Granger had effectively orphaned herself._ _

_ _Casting around desperately for something to fill her free time—restructuring a government could only distract her so much when she was still in a wartime mindset used to being occupied near twenty hours a day—she had hit upon thoughts of Sirius. Sirius Black, whose loss still hurt her best friend. Who had—possibly—not died. After all, there was no body. The man had fallen through a curtained archway, and if it didn’t lead to the other side of the archway, it had to lead somewhere else, right?_ _

_ _So really, being in an alternate universe wasn’t entirely shocking. The ritual that had blown up in her face, literally, had been one of her own creation intended to project her consciousness into the closest alternate universe for seven minutes. It would have heavily supported her theory had it succeeded, and taken her one step closer to reaching beyond the veil._ _

_ _The natural magic in this world, once she started looking for it, had revealed itself to be everywhere! It filled the air, fell in raindrops, saturated the earth, even ran through every tree and plant she had poked at with her new sense active. To feel it, she discovered, she had to be actively attempting to channel magic, so she just started to cast a lumos, stopped part way through, and held it there as she explored. While it soaked everything else around her, the only natural things it did _not _ permeate were humans, or animals. In fact, since it filled the air, she could actually detect nearby beings as voids within this incredible magical field._ _

_ _So there _was_ magic here. It was different from what she was used to, but the fact that it had any sort of reaction at all to her normal channeling technique, even if it wasn’t the reaction she expected, indicated that she was capable of interacting with it on some level. That was enough for Hermione, she determined that she would fully explore this magic, and if possible, harness it for use as she had used her own in her previous body. Previous world, she couldn’t prove it at that point, but she could feel it._ _

_ _Having a goal had actually helped her settle into her new life. To feel more like herself. Despite her new name, new family, even new body, she was still _her_! The sleek fall of her new, darker hair had been disconcerting for several years before she learned to curl it in a bizarre reversal of her perpetual battle to smooth out her old hair, and her tiny young body was a constant whisper of wrongness in the back of her head as she grew, but she was still Hermione Jean Granger, brightest witch of her age, war heroine, Pitiless Death, and research fanatic. She _would_ figure out how to harness this ambient magic, since her own was apparently on strike. And so she did._ _

_ _ She had been five when she had first attempted the Lumos, and eight by the time she figured out how to pull the magic into herself and guide it through her magic pathways. Another year of experimentation later she had figured out that while any of the magic could be pushed into the shape of any spell and would work perfectly well, if she used magic pulled from a water source for a water based spell, like aguamenti, the spells power would be vastly overpowered for the amount of magic used. It was the same for magic from the air and air based spells, plants and nature spells, and oddly, the earth for even non-physical shield spells—the earth was apparently very protective— the magic _liked_ being used for purposes related to its source. _ _

_ _All this experimentation was done wandlessly. Hermione had in fact crafted a wand before in her old life, after overloading her original wand when her power grew from the permanent enhancement ritual she had created. She had used a temporary wand for weeks as she researched ferociously. She could always have gone back to Ollivander’s, but she had read many times while researching other topics, that a self crafted wand was more responsive, more powerful, and held a closer bond with its crafter-wielder, and she wanted that. So she did what she did best. She researched, prepared, checked, checked again, and triple checked her preparations. And then she crafted her perfect partner. The wand she wielded until her death. Acacia with seven of her darling Crookshanks’ willingly offered whiskers for the core. Thirteen and a half inches, and unyielding, she never for a moment regretted the time and research that went into her creation. It was like missing a limb, being without her bonded wand here, and her beloved half kneazle familiar’s absence hurt too, but though she had the knowhow to fix at least one of those problems, she didn’t have the magical materials available to her. So without a wand she continued to practice. She was able to cast far more spells wandlessly now than she had ever mastered back home, but wasn’t certain if this was because of the unavoidable amount of practice, or because the natural magic lent itself more freely to wandless casting. For all she knew, a wand might not even work here! The uncertainty was maddening but there was nothing she could do about it right now._ _

_ _Despite her long term, ongoing experimenting and practicing with this world’s version of magic, Today was the first time she had laid eyes on another supernatural being of any kind since she arrived here. There were some odd ripples in the natural magic around Sheila Bennett, but the older woman didn’t seem to be aware of it, or do anything with it, and who knew what sort of strange biological quirks could exist in this world, but that boy. That boy was a vampire. Clearly of the Vit Ek species if vampires here corresponded with the vampires in her home world. He was pale, but not nearly pale enough to be a Venă Neagră, though she wouldn’t make the assumption that he wasn’t a completely different breed of vampire altogether. That didn’t mean she couldn’t take precautions. If he wasn’t a Vit Ek they wouldn’t do any harm, and if he was, they would give her a measure of protection against their incredibly pervasive, species characteristic, compulsive leglimency._ _

_ _Finally, evidence that she wasn’t alone. When the letter never came she had actually started to worry that she was the only magical being in this world.that the magic belonged only to the planet itself. She let out a long shaky breath, rock steady hands never faltering in their quiet clacking._ _

_ _In an echo of her previous childhood, Elena ‘call me Hermione’ Gilbert didn’t have any friends. Unlike in her last childhood, her isolation this time was by choice. If she found a way home to her previous world, she would take it in a heartbeat, and she didn’t want to leave behind broken hearted friends or family. So despite attempts by Sheriff Forbes’ daughter, and Sheila Bennett’s granddaughter to befriend her, Hermione held herself aloof, and eventually the overtures tapered off, then stopped altogether. At sixteen years old-forty four her mind grumbled-she was officially the weird loner of Mystic Falls Highschool._ _

_ _In an effort to feel like this body was truly hers, the reincarnated witch wore her straight hair in tight ringlet curls, not a patch on the riotous mane she used to possess, but she liked it far better than the glass smooth curtain it naturally fell into now. Almost always wearing long black skirts and dresses, clothes that reminded her of her witches robes without looking like she was playing dress up, she would probably be considered a goth if it weren’t for the ever changing parade of brightly coloured knitwear she perpetually sported over the black. A lilac shawl, a blue bobble hat with sparkling golden detailing, a pretty forest green cardigan. When the weather turned colder, out came a mind boggling array of scarves, from a super long one knitted in such a way it looked scaly, like a great green snake coiled around her throat, to the thick, puffy infinity scarf done in galaxy pinks and purples, to a delicate, gauzy white and gold confection that didn’t look like it could possibly offer any defence from the cold. Knitted by a muggle it probably wouldn’t have, but it wasn’t knitted by a muggle, and it kept her plenty warm. She also had carrier bags full of knitted handwear under her bed. Fingerless gloves, regular gloves, and a whole slew of mittens. So no, she wasn’t looked at as a goth, just a strange loner who didn’t quite fit in, and didn’t seem to want to. _ _

_ _Elementary school had afforded her an opportunity to fix a perceived problem. She had known if she wanted a name so different from the one the Gilberts had given her to stick and not seem suspicious she had to pull it off young, so as soon as she had access to her school’s library, age six, she had hunted down a dog eared collection of Shakespeare’s comedies and pretended to be so in love with the character of Queen Hermione she wouldn’t answer to anything else. Acceptable for a six year old. Then she simply never let up._ _

_ _Since Mystic Falls was such a small town, everyone at school with her now, had been at school with her since then, so being the weirdo who named herself after a Shakespeare character no one had ever heard of as a kid, and never grew out of it added to the strangeness about her. It worked to her benefit to keep herself isolated, and even if that hadn’t been her plan, she would have been willing to suffer much more to hear people calling her by her real name._ _

_ _Hermione had been lounging on a bench outside the school, enjoying the sun on her face while she read, snacked on an apple, and waited for the time to inch closer to the start of the school day when she’d seen him. She had heard mumbling about a new kid, which was big news in mystic falls but hadn’t paid much attention. She wished she had when she saw the unfamiliar face of an obvious vampire staring intently at her from a few feet away. She didn’t know whether she wanted to catch hold of him and assault him with questions, or bolt, but he quickly made the choice for her, striding over and sticking out a hand bearing a gaudy blue ring with a crooked grin._ _

_ _“Hi, I’m Stefan Salvatore, new kid. I don’t suppose you can show me to the principal’s office?”_ _


End file.
